“He said that in his whole life he most repented of three things: one was that he had trusted a secret to a woman; another, that he went by water when he might have gone by land; the third, that he had remained one whole day without doing any business of moment.”
Life of Marcus Cato
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
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Plutarch 251
ancient Greek historian and philosopher 46–127Related quotes

Remarks at Bloomington, Illinois (21 November 1860); published in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (1953) by Roy P. Basler, vol. 4, p. 143
1860s

Pherecydes, 2.
The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers (c. 200 A.D.), Book 2: Socrates, his predecessors and followers

Source: Steppenwolf (1927), p. 16
Context: Wait a moment, here I have it. This: 'Most men will not swim before they are able to.' Is not that witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won't think. They are made for life, not for thought. Yes, and he who thinks, what's more, he who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.

7A:20, as translated by James Legge in The Chinese Classics, Vol. II (1861), p. 335
The Mencius

“I said one day that Dole had a temper, and he got madder than hell. He has one. He has a mean one.”
Washington Post interview (1994)

Source: 1880s, Incidents and Anecdotes of the Civil War (1885), pp. 282–283